Updated for a story on the potential for a crash in the human population as we exhaust earth’s resources.
Donald Trump
We’ve reached a threshold now where I no longer believe that Donald Trump is the most likely next president. I now think what I was reluctant to conclude before, that Trump has done himself enough damage and perhaps has attracted enough of the wrong kind of attention that he has let the nomination slip away.
[Crushing primary losses in Colorado and South Carolina are] an extension of a losing streak for Trump that threatens the mogul’s odds of winning the Republican nomination at what is increasingly likely to be a contested convention in July. Trump is close to falling short of enough support in the state-level primaries and caucuses to clinch the nomination outright, meaning his fate would be determined by delegates in Cleveland.[1]
Trump simply looks more and more like a loser and in my mind this makes it increasingly likely that Ted Cruz will be the Republican nominee even if, as a Boston Globe editorial warns, in a Politico paraphrase, “that Sen. Ted Cruz . . . could be even more dangerous.”[2] I continue to believe that Hillary Clinton is an appallingly weak candidate and so it follows that I now think Cruz seems most likely to be the next president. But barely so.
To be honest, right now, I feel a lot less certain of the outcome because just as Democrats will suffer a loss of enthusiasm if they do indeed crown Clinton, Republicans may lose some authoritarian populist support in subverting their will. A lot depends on whether recent missteps are indeed, as the decided non-authoritarian populist National Review’s Jim Geraghty believes, enough to cause Trump’s supporters to reconsider.[3] Take the (probably mostly neoconservative) National Review with a grain of salt: This is the publication that launched the first major counterattack against Trump[4] and it’s entirely possible their declarations of victory will prove premature. But the deflation of Trump’s balloon now seems palpable.
Hadas Gold, “Boston Globe to publish fake front page on Trump presidency,” Politico, April 9, 2016, http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/04/boston-globe-trump-front-page-221761
Eli Stokols and Kyle Cheney, “Trump’s Saturday delegate disaster,” Politico, April 9, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/donald-trump-colorado-south-carolina-delegates-221762
Human extinction or, at least, a population crash
Rob Jordan and Amy Goldberg, “Populations of early human settlers grew like an ‘invasive species,’ Stanford researchers find,” Stanford University, April 5, 2016, http://news.stanford.edu/news/2016/april/south-america-earlyhumans-040516.html< Nika Knight, "Humans an Invasive Species Heading for a 'Crash,' Study Says," Common Dreams, April 8, 2016, http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/04/08/humans-invasive-species-heading-crash-study-says
Footnotes
- [1]Eli Stokols and Kyle Cheney, “Trump’s Saturday delegate disaster,” Politico, April 9, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/donald-trump-colorado-south-carolina-delegates-221762↩
- [2]Hadas Gold, “Boston Globe to publish fake front page on Trump presidency,” Politico, April 9, 2016, http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/04/boston-globe-trump-front-page-221761↩
- [3]Jim Geraghty, “‘Mental.’ ‘Utterly Stupid.’ ‘Trump Only Cares About Trump,’” National Review, March 30, 2016, http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/433432/mental-utterly-stupid-trump-only-cares-about-trump↩
- [4]Conor Friedersdorf, “Standing Athwart History Yelling, ‘Stop Donald Trump!'” Atlantic, January 22, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/standing-athwart-history-yelling-stop-donald-trump/426504/; National Review, “Against Trump,” January 21, 2016, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430137/donald-trump-conservative-movement-menace↩